


to build anew

by Kulkuri



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Vernon Boyd & Erica Reyes, Alpha Derek Hale, Angst with a Happy Ending, Derek Hale Deserves Nice Things, Derek Hale is a Good Alpha, Derek Hale's Past Consent Issues with Kate Argent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Human Stiles Stilinski, Identity Issues, M/M, Mermaid Stiles Stilinski, Monster of the Week, Morally Ambiguous Alan Deaton, Stiles Stilinski Deserves Nice Things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 04:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19899652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kulkuri/pseuds/Kulkuri
Summary: The water, when Derek vades into it, is cold and dark. The moon hangs low in the horizon, painting him in pale light as he carries Stiles deeper into the lake.As he forces Stiles’ head under water, he wonders absently whether or not Stiles had heard from his college applications already. If he got into the school he wanted, if he had his life all planned out. If he had finally gotten the ticket away from Beacon Hills for good.Then he supposes it doesn’t matter. As Stiles struggles wildly in his arms, thrashing in pain and fear, the man’s legs slowly begin to merge together into a long, glittering tail.With heavy heart, Derek vows to find a cure for this curse. He will not stand to watch Stiles rot away in a murky lake, in a small town like theirs, when Stiles has always been destined for far greater things.Even if those things had never included Derek.





	to build anew

**Author's Note:**

> Despite how foreboding the summary sounds, I promise this is a rather good-feel fic ^^
> 
> Thank you for reading!

  
  


The earth grumbles beneath Derek’s paws as he rushes to the clearing, twigs and rocks and loose ground scattering haphazardly behind. Boyd, ever his steady shadow, trails mere feet after him, his face contorted in a shift, eyes blazing beta gold. 

The woman is nowhere near as fast as the wolves, and as Isaac lets out a howl from the opposite direction, she curses audibly, changing her course. 

Derek echoes the howl, exposing their location. Erica answers to the call, eager and close, and that prompts Scott to let out a roar that Derek would describe as an angry cat’s screech. The witch gives out a strangled scream of frustration, changing yet again her path. 

As the wolf calls tune out, Derek strains his ears, waiting for the last signs that everyone is in their prearranged marks. There’s a moment of silence in the woods, interrupted only by the witch’s labored breathing, the thud of her feet as she runs as fast as she can. Derek can hear the approaching allies as the almost soundless thunder of their arrival makes the ground sing happily at the gathering magic. It takes another moment or two before he hears the sharp sounds of two whistles, Allison and Stiles stationed and ready.

Derek grins. They have her.

Expertly the wolves herd the witch into the clearing, a spot as wide as a field with not a single tree growing in the ground, flora flourishing all over, giving the pack advantage. She runs, desperate, straight into the trap designed for capture, only stopping when she sees the wolves bursting through the bushes from all around her, her path neatly capped off.

She gathers her breath and warily watches as everyone closes in on her. Scott has his hands up in an offer of peace, a sign he’s not going to hurt her. His eyes blaze Alpha red, taking lead, even if his pack is not all here, and not all of the wolves present his. Derek doesn’t flash his eyes, doesn’t show his Alpha status. She’ll feel safer if she thinks there is only one leader, but if she tries to take control of Scott, she’s going to be sorely disappointed that she won’t be able to order the wolves through him.

‘’It’s okay. We’re not gonna hurt you,’’ Scott says easily, panting for breath, fighting a few seconds with himself, forcing the shift back, even if his eyes stay glowing. ‘’We want to help you, if you’re in trouble. I’m Scott, the Alpha of the McCall pack. I promise, you’re safe.’’

The woman stares at him, assessing. Scott offers her a small smile. ‘’Can you tell me what’s your name?’’

The wolves creep closer, surrounding her. If she wants to get through them, she’s going to have every one of them against her, and measured against pure physical strength, she’s no match.

Derek chances a glance towards the tree Stiles is hiding in, the branch he’s perched on close enough that he’ll surely be able to hear the conversation. Next, his eyes slide over to the other side, where Allison is ready behind a long, overgrown syringa bush. Her crossbow is cocked, small pouch tied to the arrow of it, peppered smoke bomb tilted towards the target. 

There’s a sudden crackle in the air, Derek’s head snapping back to the witch in alarm. She’s looking somewhere in the sky, the color on her face draining with speed. All of the wolves have their heads cocked to the same direction, the clear blue sky flashing with purple and blue and white and grey lightings. The sound is deafening, and Derek cows down to protect his ears, paws pressing them against his scalp. Scott is doing the same, his tremulous grip on his wolf fading as the beta shift forces itself back onto the young man’s features. Everyone is trying to muffle the sound desperately, Boyd dropping to his knees, finding comfort in his Alpha, even if Derek cannot help him right now. The crackling continues, but as the pack lays incapacitated, the witch is not so helpless. She takes her only chance at escaping, and bursts away from the wolves, the crackling, the clearing, as fast as her feet carry her. 

A stretch, long, wide rift appears onto the sky as the result of the lighting, and Derek sees dark, human shaped figures dragging themselves out of it. As his focus is on that, Stiles, completely unaffected from the sound, jumps down from the tree and chases after the witch, grasping at his gun as he runs through the circle the wolves have formed. Derek tries to bark after him, a warning, but before he can utter a sound, not even sure his howl would’ve carried far enough, Stiles has run too far to hear, disappearing into the thick of the forest. Allison has come out of her hiding, her weapon aimed towards the new enemy, clearly standing as a protection for the wolves.

There are almost twenty figures slithering out of the opening, none of them paying any attention to the incapacitated pack, but most of them dash after Stiles and the woman. Allison starts shooting at them, but all of her arrows either miss or go through the shapes, the assault not even faltering the steps of the humanoids. Almost like they aren’t there at all, the physical forms merely an illusion of the mind.

Derek isn’t sure how long it takes, unable to tell time from the piercing pain, but after what feels like an eternity, the figures come back, dragging the unconscious form of the witch along them. He squints, trying to parse out whether they have Stiles or not, but he doesn’t see him. Uncertain, he’s not sure if it’s a good or a bad thing.

They drag themselves back into the rift, one after the other, the woman slugged on top of someone's shoulder the only point of contact that looks materialized enough, and then the magical portal disappears as fast as it had appeared.

The surrounding sound gives one final screech, before stopping point blank, making Derek’s eardrums pop. He groans, shifting to his human form and stands, rubbing at his ears. His Alpha healing takes care of the hearing damage almost immediately, but his betas are a lot slower to follow.

‘’Stay here,’’ he says to Boyd who looks back at him fuzzily. Derek’s certain the wolf is almost completely deaf right now. He steps closer and crouches to the beta’s level, speaking directly to Boyd’s ear. ‘’I’m going to see if Stiles is okay.’’ 

The wolf shakes his head in response, inhaling deep, calming breaths, but Derek thinks it’s more to clear his ears than outright rejection of the idea. 

Boyd offers a grunt, not even attempting to stand up. 

Derek brushes a hand gently through Boyd’s hair in an offer of comfort. ‘’Take it easy. Let yourself heal. I’ll be right back.’’

He steps around the man, finding the proper footing of his human form, and jogs into the distance. He can hear Stiles’ heartbeat as clear as a birdsong, calm and slow, similar to his sleep-state. Brows furrowing, Derek picks up the pace.

He finds Stiles underneath a tree, some of the bark littering the back of his jacket and head, the man lying unconscious on the ground. There’s a familiar smell of rosemary and electricity, clear aftereffects of the use of magic. Derek can’t smell any blood though, sees no visible marks of injury. When he reaches Stiles, he crouches down, assessing him. It doesn’t seem like he has a spinal injury from what he concludes was a direct hit against the tree, but he can’t be sure. He places a hand on his shoulder, shaking him a little, very, very carefully.

‘’Hey, Stiles. Hey. Wake up.’’

The eyes of the man flutter, a gush of breath following the movement. Derek tries again.

‘’Hey. C’mon, wake up.’’

Stiles lets out a groan, his heartbeat picking up to the gallop it mostly stays at when he’s awake. His eyes flutter again, and this time they crack open.

‘’Whassat?’’ he slurs, turning to his side sluggishly. His back is most likely fine then. Can humans move immediately after a hit if they have a head injury? Can they speak?

‘’Are you okay?’’ Derek asks, his hand coming to rest on the nape of Stiles’ neck, leeching the minimal pain from him. He places one knee on the ground and shifts his stance closer.

Giving another garbled sound, Stiles forces his eyes shut, clearly trying to balance the world back to its axis. He heaves a sigh, blinking his eyes open again, finding his bearings. He stays quiet for a moment, just staring blankly at Derek. 

Derek lets him process everything for a minute, before gently shaking him again, forcing him to focus. ‘’Are you oka--’’

‘’Issat your dick I’m look’n at?’’

Derek blinks, thrown for a second. He spares a quick glance to his naked crotch before rolling his eyes. It’s a known fact between the pack members that Derek is absolutely unashamed of nudity, having grown up with wolves that could not care less whether or not a person was wearing clothes or fur or nothing. His uncle’s girlfriend who was also of Nordic heritage, had seeped her sauna culture into their pack with no effort at all. There was nothing they loved more than to come home after a vigorous and muddy full moon frolicking in the forest, to a heated sauna where they could clean themselves and their pack members, finding comfort in the almost sacred cleansing act.

Standing up, he heaves Stiles upwards with him, getting him on his feet. 

‘’Whoah,’’ Stiles slurs as he gets righted, shaking his head when the world starts circling in the wrong direction again. He wobbles, grasping at Derek’s shoulders for purchase, only to yank his hands away when they meet Derek’s naked skin, flushing.

‘’Sorry,’’ Stiles mutters, making Derek shake his head in exasperation.

‘’Can you walk?’’

‘’I, uh, yeah. I - I s’ink so,’’ Stiles confirms shakily, and takes a few tentative steps. He gets more confident when he realizes his legs won’t give out, and then lets Derek herd him back to the clearing where the rest of the pack is waiting.

‘’What happened?’’ Derek asks, keeping his hand on the small of Stiles’ back. The ground underneath him feels cold and wet, making him long for his paws and the protective layer of his fur. 

‘’I don’t really know,’’ Stiles says, his speech stabilizing, ‘’I mean, after the weird magical lightning thing happened, and you guys all just, uh, fell on the ground, I just thought it was her doing something, you know? So I followed her, trying to get a hit on her to maybe stop the spell or magical whammy or whatever. You guys were holding your ears but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. She was very deft at dodging, and didn’t seem all too bothered with me, but then the freaky black figures started following us, so she got defensive.’’

Righting Stiles as he stumbles on a root, the man frowns, squinting at something in the distance, recalling, ‘’She uh, made tiny spells with different ingredients she picked from her pockets. She missed all of the black figure thingies, but one of them must’ve hit me, because the next thing I know, I’m blasted off against a tree, and then poof, nothing. Expect. You know. You. And that,’’ he makes a vague gesture towards Derek’s genitalia, ‘’Which, uh, you should definitely cover up. Ever heard of public decency? Or indecency. It’s a thing. Like, a law thing. You should probably look that up.’’

Before Derek has a chance to respond with something preferably sarcastic, they hit the line of the clearing and Scott starts running towards them. Derek takes a step back, letting Scott do his protective alpha rounds. The teen smells terrified, the scare of almost losing his faux-brother clearly raising his hackles.

_ ‘’Oh my God _ , are you okay dude? Those things were like, really freaky and they started just  _ chasing _ you and you just disappeared from  _ everyone’s _ sight -- ‘’

‘’I’m fine, Scott. Look. No wounds or injuries or anything. Just got cocked out -’’ snorting a laugh at his own stumble, he corrects,  _ ‘’conked out _ \- for a minute there.’’

Scott frowns in concern, hands going up and down, impotently hovering just above Stiles’ shoulders, like he doesn’t know where to start. Derek resist the urge to roll his eyes. Scott can more often than not,  _ smell  _ whether or not Stiles is hurt. The only thing that even a wolf’s abilities won’t detect are internal bleedings. 

Even after all these years, it still seems that Scott’s more willing to suppress his heightened senses and pretend he’s a normal human being, rather than embrace his new heritage. It ticks Derek in all the wrong ways, gratuitously flaring up his anger.

Letting Scott handle his best friend, Derek turns around to see his own betas. Boyd has managed to get to his feet, hands rubbing at his sensitive ears, a grimace on his face. Erica is standing a couple feet away from Boyd, letting Allison brush leaves and dirt from her clothes. Isaac slinks closer to Derek, unperturbed of his naked state as he sticks himself side to side with his alpha.

Derek lifts his arm and covers Isaac’s neck with his hand, feeling the beta go lax. ‘’You okay?’’ he asks, and Isaac nods. He looks miserable though, with dried blood tracks seeping from his ears.

‘’Allison says she didn’t hear anything,” Isaac tells him quietly, staring at the hunter. ‘’She thought we had been whammied by a spell or something when all of us went down.’’

Derek frowns, the information concurring with Stiles’. ‘’The frequencies must’ve been low enough for a human not to be affected by them.’’

Isaac shrugs. ‘’Whatever that was, wasn’t human.  _ They  _ weren’t human. Makes me wonder if the woman had been a witch to begin with, or something else.’’

‘’A necromancer, probably,’’ Derek says comfortably. ‘’Most likely than not, she and someone from her coven had been dipping their hands into black magic.’’ It’s the only logical explanation he can come up with.

He’s never actually seen the druidic council that maintains the balance between magic and mundane, nor has he seen the high council of Gods of nature, but that wasn’t just a coven chasing their strayed member. The effortless way they created a passageway from nothing but thin air spoke of powers far more potent than Derek’s ever sensed in his lifetime. And they were after just mere one witch. Something cold settles into his stomach, the ugly premonition carving itself over his bones.

‘’Hey, Stiles,’’ he says, making the younger man turn towards him. ‘’You should check yourself at the ER. Make sure you didn’t get a head injury.’’

Stiles rolls his eyes. ‘’I didn’t  _ actually _ hit my head, dude. I’m fine.’’

‘’You lost consciousness for several minutes,’’ Derek says seriously. ‘’If there’s an internal bleeding, you might not detect it right away. It might start affecting you  _ days _ from now. We can’t scent something like that. Go to the ER.’’

‘’He’s right, man,’’ Scott agrees reluctantly. ‘’You shouldn’t belittle a hit to the head. At least let my mom take a look. She won’t add anything to your medical files.’’

Stiles sighs dramatically. ‘’Fine.  _ God _ . Stop looking at me with those puppy-eyes, dude. Put them away. I promise to let your mom have a look. The worst I have is a couple scrapes on my elbows. I’m  _ fine _ .’’

‘’We’ll let my mom decide that,’’ Scott says gently, pulling Stiles to a half-hug. Stiles pretends to push away, but Derek can smell the affection. He lets out a relieved breath.

‘’C’mon,’’ Scott says, drawing his best friend along with him, ‘’Let’s go stop by the ER and get something to eat. I’m  _ starving _ .’’ 

At Isaac’s imploring look, Derek sighs and nods. A pizza sounds good to him. His beta grins carefully, happy, and skips to Erica’s side, joining her and Allison. Derek shakes his head fondly, and brushes off some of the dirt on himself.

A crow suddenly screeches, taking off of a nearby tree branch. Derek flinches at the sound, chills running faintly through his skin. Uneasy, he takes a stock on their surroundings, feeling like  _ something’s _ just went off balance, but unable to see the reason for it. His instincts are blaring their alarm bells though. 

The clearing is empty, all signs of the creatures gone. Animals have gone hush, skittering into hiding. It casts an eerie atmosphere into the clearing as thick fog starts rising from the forest. Frowning, he sends one last look around before his pack and the McCall's are all herding him towards their cars. Slightly reluctant, he transforms back into his fur.

There's nothing he can do when the danger isn't physical anymore. So he goes easily, following the trail of familiar heartbeats, unable to shake off the feeling that there’s some tiny detail they have just missed, and that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  
  
  
  


***  
  
  


The fresh smell of paint permeates the air with their humes, swirling thick and invasive in Derek’s nose, even through the white mask. The brush swishes quietly against the wooden boards, muted green colour spreading evenly with every stroke, hiding the original grey of the plank underneath. 

The late spring sun shines warmly against his back as he works, nature peaceful around him. There’s a stereo playing near inaudibly close by, his phone attached to it, with a serene playlist that Stiles had compiled to the pack some months ago. He’d done it after Isaac had complained about being unable to sleep with the sounds of his neighbours arguing next door. Too many negative connotations attached to the sounds of raised, angry voices and objects shattering against walls and floors. 

The music is soft, simple notes with no words, the songs fitting the feeling of an easy summer morning. Stiles likes to change the songs every once in awhile, so Derek enjoys the ones he has as long as he can.

He’s wearing his old college t-shirt, a few stripes of paint adorning the shirt already. He carefully wipes the last drops of the paint onto the wall before dropping it in a bucket of hot water, starting to wash it. 

The work is cathartic. After the town had declared his childhood home a hazard to the public, demanding he either demolish it or recover the building, Derek had decided to recover it. He’d accidentally started the process when he had gone in one night, impotently angry at the world with nothing to release the negative energy on, and started trashing the place more than it already had been wrecked before. 

Floorboard after floorboard he’d dug out, tearing the planks of the walls down, shredding the last remains of the stairs leading upstairs. After an hour of exhausting himself on the humes of the faded smells of ash and wolfsbane and smoke, he’d felt a little better, if a lot sick from the poison that polluted the air.

And then it had become his project. He keeps working on the house during daylight, returning home to his loft during nights, sometimes to an empty apartment, sometimes to his betas cramming their brains full of information for their preferred college entrance exams. Every now and then Stiles pops in and out, contentedly sharing space with Derek’s betas and Derek himself, his happiness frequently uplifting the mood.

Whenever the teenagers feel bored enough, they’ll stop by the Hale house to help Derek break things. Even Scott comes by sometimes, usually dragged by Stiles and Kira.

He and Scott are on okay terms these days. There was a tense full year that Derek had been too angry to even  _ consider _ being civil with Scott. It had happened after Scott had had a mishap with some pixies when he had visited his father outside of Beacon Hills. Notorious for their quick tempers and mistaken bouts of anger, Scott had had no tact whatsoever when meeting with the trickster fairies.

The offended and outraged pixies had followed Scott back home, kidnapping Stiles as a measure of their revenge, trapping the human inside a tree trunk for three consecutive days. They’d only released him after Kira had asked for Derek’s help, revealing the issue after he’d sent concerned queries about Stiles’ whereabouts to her since all of his texts had gone unanswered, which was unheard of for Stiles. With Kira’s help, he’d managed to formally dissuade the misunderstanding. 

They still had to find Stiles after the fairies’ departure, and it took Derek and his pack almost two hours scrounging the preserve until Derek found the man lying unconscious almost ten miles from the Hale house. His face and knuckles were red and bleeding, clear signs he had become desperate to get out, screaming and kicking as much as the narrow trunk had allowed him to, only to have the silent forest bear witness with nobody coming for rescue.

And because of that, Stiles still cannot stand to stay in an enclosed space for more than five minutes at a time, even with his extensive therapy. In the beginning, Stiles couldn’t even sleep with the lights off, the dark shadows of his room feeling like the walls were suffocating him, boxing him too tightly in. He could barely enter a bathroom at all, the tiny space enhancing his claustrophobia to near inhuman levels of terror. 

The fairy lights, ironically, that Kira bought him actually helped, and Derek invested in some of those too after Stiles kept falling asleep in the loft during study nights. It also didn’t hurt that Derek’s bathroom is the size of a kitchen, enabling Stiles to use it without a panic attack.

He’s disturbed from his musings when he hears the familiar, distant rumble of Stiles’ Jeep groveling up the dirt road. He wipes his hands on the hem of his shirt, pulling down his mask and walks to the front to greet the man.

The car is parked carefully on the front lawn, Stiles pulling it neatly right next to the Camaro. It’s been a couple days since the witch disappeared and Derek hasn’t heard a peep of anyone apart from Boyd. He’s been assuming all of the teenagers are busy cramming, and by the looks of the sleep-deprived black bruises under Stiles’ eyes, he’s not too far from the truth.

‘’Hey,’’ Derek says, as Stiles unpacks his long limbs. ‘’Shouldn’t you be at school?’’

‘’Nah,’’ Stiles says, ‘’Or, well, yes, yes I should be. But I have a standing appointment with my therapist every Friday morning, so I’m dismissed from class, like, with permission and stuff, but Mrs. Wójick had to cancel last minute so instead of being a responsible student, I came here to hang.’’ He pauses, squinting in Derek’s direction. ‘’If that’s cool with you.’’

Shrugging, Derek gestures him to come forward. If Stiles wants to sweat and work instead of catching another forty winks of z’s, who’s Derek to stop him? The man obliges, following him to the back of the house where he had been working just moments before.

Stiles gapes at the expert workmanship Derek has done to the exterior. ‘’Oh,  _ wow _ , you’re pretty far along with everything already.’’

‘’Yeah,’’ Derek agrees, snatching another paint brush from its packaging and grabbing similar mask he wears, offering them to Stiles. ‘’There’s still things to work on inside, but I got tired of being stuck within four walls with a weather like this.’’

Nodding, Stiles takes the brush and rolls his sleeves up. ‘’I totally get that,’’ he says. ‘’So what do you want me to do?’’

Derek points to the direction of a blank, paint-free part of the wall. ‘’You can start there. Meet me in the middle.’’

Stiles does.

  
  


An hour and a half later has them both sweating under the hot afternoon sun, smears of color littering their clothes and patches of skin. Derek’s drenched in sweat, wet spots around his neck and back, as well as his armpits. Stiles’ appearance is similar. As Derek downs his first bottle of water, Stiles, oddly, is drinking his third.

‘’You okay?’’ Derek asks. Stiles heaves a breath and sits down, shading his face when he looks up at Derek. His face is flushed bright red, the hue creeping down under the collar of his shirt, extending to the skin of both of his arms. His eyes seem a little glassy, pupils dilated.

‘’Yeah,’’ Stiles pants, ‘’Just. Hard to breathe in this heat. The water helps.’’

Derek blinks. It isn’t  _ that  _ hot. It’s barely the beginnings of a Californian summer. Stiles should be used to much, much more hotter temperatures. He doesn’t say anything about it though. He points to a shaded spot underneath an apple tree. ‘’You should go sit down there for a moment. Get out of the sun.’’

‘’Probably a good idea, yeah,’’ Stiles says, standing to his feet. He sways for a moment before somewhat balancing himself, and Derek gets immediate flashbacks to the incident a couple days before. His hand flashes out to steady the human without fully being conscious of it, getting a whiff of Stiles’ scent as he does so.

Stiles gives a faint  _ ‘oompf’  _ when he collides with Derek’s chest. There’s something. . . Off about the man. Derek grabs at Stiles’ neck, gently baring it, giving the man plenty of room to resist or step away if he wants to. Stiles doesn’t, though he seems confused when Derek sticks his nose against the heated skin of his throat. 

Underneath the deodorant, the body wash and the cream Stiles uses for his dry skin, there’s a basic scent of him that doesn’t change in people, ever. It’s something that helps werewolves track their pack members, specific hunters, lost children. . . With so many smells in the world, each person has a certain trait to their odor that can be similar between blood relatives, but there is never a same one twice. And as people age, their skin, their brain, bones, everything starts slowly deteriorating, the human body ever changing, but the basic scent never reforms.

And yet.

Taking a deep inhale, Derek parses through the humes of the paint, the fresh cut of grass, the sun, the laundry detergent, every minuscule smell he can differentiate, chasing that one trademark scent that makes Stiles,  _ Stiles _ . 

‘’Uh --’’

He trails his nose up the skin of Stiles’ throat, up to the back of his ear where the odor is the strongest, apart from the crotch. It should have a certain spicy after smell, something fresh and wild, like electricity on a day that thunder booms loudly against the sky, over and over and over.

Exhaling in relief, Derek finds it. It’s somehow muted, like something is either seeping in its place or covering it.

‘’Have you been to Deaton’s lately?’’ he asks, taking a step back from the human, but staying close enough that he can still keep Stiles steady with his hand.

‘’Uh, wha - No, well, kind of?’’ Stiles wavers, making a seesaw gesture with his hand. ‘’Deaton was at Scott’s house yesterday when I went to pick up my AC Brotherhood. I only saw him, like, briefly.’’

That could barely explain it, but. . .

‘’Have you had any aftereffects of the spell the woman used on you?’’

Brushing a hand through his sweaty hair, Stiles frowns. ‘’I don’t. . . Think so? I mean, I’ve slept really badly, but hey, that’s pretty common these days. Though I wasn’t having any nightmares, I just couldn’t sleep, ‘s all. Had to dug out my old fan because I’ve been sweating like crazy.’’

Placing a hand on Stiles’ forehead, the man doesn’t feel feverish to Derek. 

‘’Did Mrs. McCall find anything out of the ordinary when she checked you over?’’

Stiles shakes his head, making Derek’s hand slip away. ‘’She ran some scans but all came out clean. Even all that stuff with the - With the - ‘’

‘’Nogitsune,’’ Derek supplies, when he sees how much the younger man still struggles with it. 

‘’Yeah,’’ Stiles agrees quietly. ‘’Even all that was gone. No sign of any bleeding or trauma or anything. No bump even! Just good ol’ me, still riding the ADHD train and still prescribed Adderall frequently.’’

Derek nods slowly. ‘’I think --’’ he starts, but is interrupted by Stiles’ ringtone. The man grimaces and slides the phone from his back pocket, swiping his thumb to quiet the alarm.

‘’Sorry,’’ Stiles apologizes, ‘’I gotta head back to school. Last few days before graduation, you know? Can’t afford to miss any of the important classes in case any of the teachers decide to be really petty and push a grade down because of last minute absences. It’s been known to happen, at least with Mr. Harris and our history teacher, Mr. Woody. You’d think they’d want to be rid of us by now, but failing people and not letting them graduate is pretty much their MO.’’

Derek huffs unhappily. ‘’Alright. But. Tell me if you notice anything off with how you’re feeling. Be conscious of your own body. Be smart about this.’’

Stiles salutes him cheekily, wiping some of the sweat off his face. ‘’Got it, boss man.’’

Snorting, Derek offers one of the rags he’s been wiping his hands on to Stiles. ‘’I’m serious. Even if Mrs. McCall found nothing, there could still be severe magical residue on you that could wreck havoc inside your body.’’  _ Or brain _ , he doesn’t say, but the younger man hears him loud and clear.

Stiles takes the rag and wipes his hands, scrubbing at some of the most obvious stains on his forearms. ‘’I know,’’ he says, humor vanishing instantly. ‘’I’ll let you know. If I notice  _ anything _ not regular a la Stilinski, I’ll pack myself up, speed safely to you and we can go see Deaton, see what he thinks.’’

Getting a pinched look, Derek nods. Deaton will be their  _ last  _ resort. He’s learned the hard way not to trust the druid as far as he can throw him. If it’ll benefit him, Deaton will omit information from them with absolutely no remorse.

‘’Okay,’’ Stiles says, patting himself down. ‘’I think I’m somewhat presentable right now. I really gotta get going. Thanks for - You know. Letting me help. Or hang. And stuff. See you around?’’

‘’Yeah,’’ Derek says. ‘’Graduation the latest.’’

Stiles pulls a face. ‘’That’s like, a week and a half from now. I’m already done with my exams, did them in early may, so I can come around to help a lot more with the house.’’ He pauses. ‘’I mean, if you want help. Or company. Or whatever.’’

Derek shakes his head in faint amusement. ‘’I’ll let you know,’’ he offers, and Stiles grins.

‘’See you!’’ the man shouts, walking backwards towards his Jeep. ‘’Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Hale!’’

‘’That list isn’t all that long,’’ Derek mutters, but gives a small wave back when Stiles gets to his car, clambers in, cheekily honks the horn and drives away. He stays standing on the front lawn until the final gurgles of the Jeep’s engine fade into the distance.

Then he puts the mask back onto his face and gets back work, ignoring the beads of sweat trailing against the skin of his back.

He’ll enjoy these halcyon days of youth before the storm decides to descend on all of them.

  
  


***


End file.
